Boss Tower and Baseplate Flange Optimization

Abstract

Abstract The swaging process is commonly used in head stack assembly, which is a process that is undertaken to either reduce or increase the diameter of tubes or rods. In the head stack assembly process, a swage boss engages with an arm hole of E-Block. Current hard disk drives have very small tolerances, requiring the swage effect of new hard disk drives to be reduced to as little as possible. In this study, finite element analysis (FEA) was used to reduce the swage effect. At present, FEA and investigative tests indicate that a significant portion of gram changing through swaging is caused by E-block tip deformation due to swaging. Deformation of the E-block tip is the result of unbalanced swage forces between the tension and compression suspension. Achieving optimization concepts leads to a new swage plate design to reduce the gramload change of the target and to equalize the swage forces. The FEA results found that gramload change of the target decreased by 35% on the tension side, and by 65% on the compression side through swage by boss tower. The HGA torque out was not different. The suspension flange was also studied. Subsequently, suspension manufacturing is able to bias the suspension as incoming HGA. The flange deformation might be closer to zero after the swaging process.